In this doctoral thesis I experiment with images of damaged ancient figurative sculpture, physical space and a specific set of materials in order to generate a fresh understanding of how one’s personal experiences mingle with the residues, presences and traces of others peoples’ pasts, presents and perhaps, futures. Two questions drive this thesis. How are materials and material culture caught up with remembering? And, how are the broken stone and bronze bodies of Antiquity entangled with our contemporary social dimension?
First investigating early photography’s association with violence and then considering the material properties and qualities of ancient figurative sculpture I investigate the relationships between materials and remembering. This research then goes on to coin and explore the the concept of premembering
which through the development of this thesis I have come to define as a distributed system of memory-related cognition that extends beyond the individual and is enacted through a process of active externalism that embraces both the properties and qualities of materials in processes of mutual participation.
Then taking this highly personal and psychic sensation to a social level, I examine premembering as the materially triggered understanding of events, circumstances or conditions that one may have not directly experienced, but which one’s culture already knows and stores up for all its future participants.
Finally, considering this notion of premembering within the context of Michel Serres’ conception of collective acceptance, complicity and intentionality (in relation to violence), I consider the contemporary socio-cultural legacies of damaged ancient figurative sculpture and question how, through the conflation of the properties, qualities and sensed histories of materials, premembering might be considered a future-shaping force that can be made manifest in original artworks.

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